Can This Band Help Bridge The Gap Between Country Music And City Audiences?

Last Friday Australian pop country trio The McClymonts released their fourth album, Here’s To You & I, and launched it in intimate Sydney venue The Basement.

While that’s not particularly remarkable in itself, the fact that, in one opinion, “There hasn’t been a better Australian pop single emerge this year than the one that kicks off the trio’s fourth record” the city experiment becomes fascinating. Country music in Australia has found itself in the middle of a healthy discussion about identity and the future (even if not everyone wanted to have the discussion), with a lot of the talk centring around our relation to the goliath American scene and whether ‘country’ has become a dirty word.

"We didn’t feel like we could give 100 percent to the last album, we felt like we’d neglected it a little bit."

In Sydney and Melbourne particularly, alt-country and Americana nights are attracting regular crowds of punters who are listening to country without the tag. And even though the three sisters that make up The McClymonts have built a career under the country banner, the mix of demographics that were dancing in the venue’s aisles to back catalogue numbers like Two Worlds Collide as well as new hits like Here’s To You & I proved that music’s oldest cliché – that great music will rise above genres – is true even for Australia’s most segregated mainstream scene.

There’s also an air of rejuvenation around The McClymonts. This fourth album comes after a brief break for the band, during which families were started, relationships broke down and engagements were confirmed. They opted for a change of manager after 2012’s Two Worlds Collide album and decided that Australia was the focus – cracking America came second.

“We didn’t feel like we could give 100 percent to the last album, we felt like we’d neglected it a little bit,” Samantha McClymont told theMusic.com.au prior to the launch show.

“Because we were constantly going back and forth between American and Australia and sometimes you feel like you can’t give 100 percent of yourself to either territory, because you’re just not there long enough. So we [made] a conscious decision this time to be here, everything about this album is here. We wrote all the songs here, we recorded it here – this is the first album out of the four that we wrote and recorded here in Australia – and we booked a tour in that we want to see go towards eight or nine months.”

American-born Sydney-based Jenny Queen opened the night with a band made up of young guns Universal have signed to their songwriting and production teams (as well as one Shane Nicholson) with cuts from her Americana-drenched album Small Town Misfits. Any nerves Queen has on stage were again overcome by a whisky and the purity of tales like Mother’s Son and Let Her Go, tracks which when performed live cut through appearances and head straight to the human experiences.

Jenny Queen

For the headliners this was the first time that many of their tracks had been performed live, but their confidence grew as the night went on – no doubt thanks in part to the growing sections of crowd out of their seat and dancing in the walkways.

“We had to re-evaluate what we wanted to do and how we wanted to go about this new album,” McClymont said. “I think it was a well needed break, but it got us to stop and appreciate everything we’ve been able to do in the past eight years because we’ve never really done that.”

On the launch show, which she admits “starts out small” she said, “We have done The Enmore [Theatre] and things like that before, but for a new album I think we’re just going to make it intimate, make it a smaller venue and your fans will come.

“They’re such great loyal fans that they’ll come to you. And there is a lot of country music building in the city now – so we do have a lot of people who may not necessarily listen to ‘country’ but they like our music and they want to come along to a city a venue on a Friday night and have a good time.”

All pics by Cole Bennetts